If anything I think a non-government entity (compared to a supra-government entity like the EU or UN) should be put in charge.

As for China and Russia, let them do whatever they want internally to their country wide intranet they have created ( well okay China and Australia, Russia not as much) but leave the internet in more capable hands then the ITU

The argument that the U.S. should not be in a position of power as far as overseeing the Internet will be bolstered by a world set aflame by news that the U.S. may have exploited its technological advantage to attack sovereign nations with Flame and Stuxnet.

I don't fully understand the workings of the internet or how much control one country could have over it but I'm guessing that there are parts that can be controlled. Much like a system admin can control a company intranet. But then maybe I'm understanding it wrong.

But, if indeed one country can control part or even all of the internet, I'd rather it remain the US for now. Yes we can all point out abuses against human rights, constitution violations and other things the US has done in the past. But China actually stops it's own citizens viewing vast parts of the web. And Russia isn't exactly known for being liberal either. As for middle eastern countries, who knows what they'd want to do.

So yeah, maybe the US could do better. Maybe. But I'd damn well rather them in charge than China, Russia or some other censor happy country.

Son, I am disappoint. You gotta put more effort into your work. Just blaming it on teh Jooz is so passé. The least you could do if you want to get a passing mark for this section is to hotlink to a photo of Israeli schoolchildren writing insults in chalk on Israeli artillery shells, or something, but this is just totally inadequate.

The sound of one hand clapping:I don't fully understand the workings of the internet or how much control one country could have over it but I'm guessing that there are parts that can be controlled. Much like a system admin can control a company intranet. But then maybe I'm understanding it wrong.

The original concept of the Internet was a communications network that could continue to function even if major cities were destroyed, as if in a nuclear war. As a result, most things about it are very, very decentralized. Controlling single sites is easy, as is controlling a network of computers when you have access to all of their configurations. But to get control of the Internet, you'd have to control everything of significance on it.

The closest one can practically get to controlling the Internet would be the root DNS servers, which essentially control which name points where. These make up one of the few relatively centralized areas of the Internet, and would make a convenient point of some measure of control.

So yeah, maybe the US could do better. Maybe. But I'd damn well rather them in charge than China, Russia or some other censor happy country.

Yeah, I'm inclined to agree that US control of the Internet is the least intolerable option at present. Not perfect, but considerably less terrible than the alternatives.

This is the part where I'll have to admit my ignorance as to how the man behind the curtain makes our tubes work... But I assumed the servers and switches that run the portion of the Internet which the western world cares about were located on western soil.They could fiddle with the servers inside their borders, but not ours. Not unless we fork over some kind of legal authority, or they take over something big like DNS routing or Google.

They might be able to hack some servers, but what would stop us from physically walking up to those machines and resetting them?

This is the part where I'll have to admit my ignorance as to how the man behind the curtain makes our tubes work... But I assumed the servers and switches that run the portion of the Internet which the western world cares about were located on western soil.They could fiddle with the servers inside their borders, but not ours. Not unless we fork over some kind of legal authority, or they take over something big like DNS routing or Google.

They might be able to hack some servers, but what would stop us from physically walking up to those machines and resetting them?

they could try to run their own separate DNS zones - given russia and china different namespaces and fracturing the internet (direct IP to IP communication would work)

but i fail to see why loosing russia and china from the internet would be a bad thing - most of the spam comes from domains registered to local registries in this countries which have poor compliance policies for their WHOIS data.

StoneColdAtheist:HotWingConspiracy: All to support Israel's paranoia. Totally worth it.

Son, I am disappoint. You gotta put more effort into your work. Just blaming it on teh Jooz is so passé. The least you could do if you want to get a passing mark for this section is to hotlink to a photo of Israeli schoolchildren writing insults in chalk on Israeli artillery shells, or something, but this is just totally inadequate.

I was really blaming us and I've been told that they got themselves real live muslims in israel as well as jews. They're in the process of booting out the blacks of any religion though.

HellRaisingHoosier:Fourth, China, India, Russia and many more countries actively and constantly attack the United States and her businesses ... probably under state-sanctioned observation.

As an employee at a major telecom, THIS. We deal with attacks out of China daily. Whoops, did I say daily? I meant multiple times per day.

We had some Chinese customers in the facility the other day and, through talking with them, it came out that it's just standard business practice over there. You have a business rival? You attack them. That's just what you do over there.

Personally, I think we should just sever all data connections to China.

Honest Bender:HellRaisingHoosier: Fourth, China, India, Russia and many more countries actively and constantly attack the United States and her businesses ... probably under state-sanctioned observation.

As an employee at a major telecom, THIS. We deal with attacks out of China daily. Whoops, did I say daily? I meant multiple times per day.

We had some Chinese customers in the facility the other day and, through talking with them, it came out that it's just standard business practice over there. You have a business rival? You attack them. That's just what you do over there.

Personally, I think we should just sever all data connections to China.

THIS.The words of an honest bender are the only I need, also hell raising hoosiers, who are normally untrustworthy, I still believe in this case.

/I'm going to send you a check for 2500 dollars, you just need to send me a money order for 300 so I can ship it to you.

Honest Bender:HellRaisingHoosier: Fourth, China, India, Russia and many more countries actively and constantly attack the United States and her businesses ... probably under state-sanctioned observation.

As an employee at a major telecom, THIS. We deal with attacks out of China daily. Whoops, did I say daily? I meant multiple times per day.

We had some Chinese customers in the facility the other day and, through talking with them, it came out that it's just standard business practice over there. You have a business rival? You attack them. That's just what you do over there.

Personally, I think we should just sever all data connections to China.

Kazan:I fail to see why loosing russia and china from the internet would be a bad thing

If they cut themselves off from our servers and redirect their shoppers to Amazon.commie then it hurts them more than it does us.I can see their complaint that no one should be allowed to exploit physical ownership of the internet for national goals... but its a hollow one, coming from them.

I doubt either of those two nations would resist the urge to tamper with the network themselves. Given legal authority or the opportunity to have armed soldiers looking over the shoulders of IT workers, you damn well know they'd use it for their own goals.

Sure it is. You know it is because they made it their HUGE 48 POINT FONT HEADLINE for most of the day on the main page of the site. They wouldn't do that for any reason other than that it's a legit noisenews story, right?

/ seriously MSNBC, who the fark do you think you are, CNN?

StoneColdAtheist:You gotta put more effort into your work. Just blaming it on teh Jooz is so passé

"Israel" is not "teh jewz". Israel is a country with its own political and military ambitions and activities and the fact that most people in Israel are Jewish does not give them blanket immunity from criticism for those activities. Israel does not engage in this sort of activity because it's full of Jewish people, it engages in this kind of activity because it's full of warmongering, paranoid political entities just like many other countries.

/ the level of paranoia and warmongering that is justifiable because of its semi-unique status is a debatable matter

simplicimus:So, if the US is behind Flame, perhaps we should remind the UN of the barrage of attacks from China against US computers on the internet. I'm sure we can also find some dirt on the Russians.

Done in one. I came here to bring this up. Farking China has bee hacking .mil and .gov for a decade. And Russia? Tough to run the internet on a vodka soaked hamster.

simplicimus:So, if the US is behind Flame, perhaps we should remind the UN of the barrage of attacks from China against US computers on the internet. I'm sure we can also find some dirt on the Russians.

Thats not hard since almost every dangerous virus has originated in some Russian or eastern European state.

I dont trust our government at all but I trust ICANN, there is no way I would trust the UN on any topic and especially not the middle eastern countries who harbor a hatred of the west and its smuttiness.

uber humper:I'd imagine Holder's contempt charge is providing them with enough talking points for the next few days.

What I find amazing is this is a larger story than Valerie Plame yet its not getting a lot of press, someone leaked this but there are no screams for finding out who now like the left screamed when that story broke.

steamingpile:simplicimus: So, if the US is behind Flame, perhaps we should remind the UN of the barrage of attacks from China against US computers on the internet. I'm sure we can also find some dirt on the Russians.

Thats not hard since almost every dangerous virus has originated in some Russian or eastern European state.

I dont trust our government at all but I trust ICANN, there is no way I would trust the UN on any topic and especially not the middle eastern countries who harbor a hatred of the west and its smuttiness.

i don't trust the UN with it either and i'm a frakking liberal who LIKES THE IDEA OF THE UN (as a place for countries to come together and cooperate to solve problems and peacefully resolve disputes - not necessarily what it has become though)

The sound of one hand clapping:I don't fully understand the workings of the internet or how much control one country could have over it but I'm guessing that there are parts that can be controlled.

You can control your own backyard with an iron fist, and China does just that. However, the Internet is de-centralized by nature so there are no "keys" to own or hand over. There are a number of organizations with amounts of power that make me queasy (third-party certificate authorities for example) but even the root DNS servers can be bypassed. You can configure your computer to ignore them by editing the hosts files on your hard drive. A lot of the infrastructure is maintained by for-profit companies but the Internet has reached a level of political importance that they effectively operate with the Sword of Damocles hovering over their decision-makers. If Juniper, for example, decided to hold the Internet hostage you'd see Congress pass anti-trust legislation overnight to pacify some VERY angry businesses.

But that's the thing -- you can control YOUR machines, in any way you want, and that generally boils down to either they work or they don't. The problem, at least for assholes, is that all you can really do to the Internet is take yourself out of it. In fact, that's a very effective way of dealing with DDoS attacks -- route all the traffic from the attacking IPs to a single server. That server WILL go down, but. . . So? Most major sites have dozens of servers. Some have hundreds or even thousands. So the attackers think they've succeeded and high-five each other while it's business as usual for everyone else. It's win-win, and life goes on.

Conversely, the Internet is self-regulated in the sense that the biggest value you can get out of it is to utilize it as much as possible, so it pays to play nice. You CAN go "eff it" and configure a DNS server that doesn't conform to any RFC, but why would you? All you'd accomplish is DoS-ing your own site. If a standard is adopted, anyone who doesn't conform to it finds their traffic either dropped or filtered. The Internet is remarkable in that the content is impossible to control, but content delivery is world where you must conform or die. I mean, hell, right now they're trying to convert to IPv6 but the infrastructure conversion is proving to be very painful because any machine that only accepts IPv6 is effectively isolated from the Internet.

Gonad the Ballbarian:The US is in its decline. We are the pre-WWII equivalent of thinking battleships are the future with our "smart planes" and drones...

Cyber warfare is the new battlefield.

If I'm understanding the article right:Its the United States taking advantage of Cyber warfare to threaten other nations. Which is why they claim to want control over the internet.Despite their own aggressive actions and constant testing of our systems, we've managed to slip nasty little bugs into their computers and this scares them.To which they would feel more secure if they ran things... but then no one would be secure from them.

way south:Gonad the Ballbarian: The US is in its decline. We are the pre-WWII equivalent of thinking battleships are the future with our "smart planes" and drones...

Cyber warfare is the new battlefield.

If I'm understanding the article right:Its the United States taking advantage of Cyber warfare to threaten other nations. Which is why they claim to want control over the internet.Despite their own aggressive actions and constant testing of our systems, we've managed to slip nasty little bugs into their computers and this scares them.To which they would feel more secure if they ran things... but then no one would be secure from them.

StoneColdAtheist:HotWingConspiracy: All to support Israel's paranoia. Totally worth it.

Son, I am disappoint. You gotta put more effort into your work. Just blaming it on teh Jooz is so passé. The least you could do if you want to get a passing mark for this section is to hotlink to a photo of Israeli schoolchildren writing insults in chalk on Israeli artillery shells, or something, but this is just totally inadequate.

So Israel and the Jews are the same thing to you? Is it possible to criticize Israel without "blaming it on teh Jooz"?